Convergence of ideas is often indicative that this intersection ought to be inspected more carefully. When multiple great thinkers reach similar or identical conclusions, it lends more credence to the point they’ve landed on. It does not, of course, guarantee it is truth, But it does provide a sort of beacon for curious minds to hone on in, and consider for themselves. One such convergence of ideas is that of Jung and Nietzsche. In fact, both of these thinkers reached many conclusions about the human psyche and human nature that are overlapping and eternally pertinent. In this instance, we will inspect the overlapping constituents of their ideas about the psyche and self-actualization.
In doing so, we are going to learn suggestions from some of the greatest thinkers of all time concerning a host of pertinent and perilous issues: why you are in danger of becoming evil and how to prevent it, why you should honestly appraise both the positive and negative elements of yourself and how you might handle each of them, why you should be suspicious of the integrity of your own thoughts, why you should consider adopting a “Dionysian world view”, and how you might go about achieving self-actualization.
For both Jung and Nietzsche, the psyche was something labyrinthine. To make ones way through the labyrinth with the intent of making a map of one’s psyche was a perilous and immensely difficult trial. Nietzsche asserted that it would drive most people mad. Many a philosopher, psychologist, or neuroscientist has devoted their entire lives and careers to understanding themselves, and never fully elucidated the mystery. It may be an impossible feat to reach the perfect pinnacle of such enlightenment. As John Archibald Wheeler so aptly pointed out, “We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.” Or to go back further, Aristotle more simply said, “the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” Thus we are trapped in a sort of eternal struggle for self-knowledge, and more we learn about ourselves it often feels like the less we understand ourselves.
Part of this problem seems to be that the more knowledge one attains, the more questions one has. A particularly pertinent example is when one starts to learn about psychology to try and understand themselves, they learn about the problem of bias. All humans are subject to intense emotional and cognitive bias and distortions, and intellect doesn’t spare you from this. Thus, when one becomes more knowledgeable of their own psychological context, they start to doubt themselves. In the words of Bertrand Russell, “the fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” An intelligent person knows to scrutinize their own thinking, and investigate it in an attempt to uncover personal bias. Yet still, this path to understanding oneself is an important one to embark on.
Jung pointed out that, to the greatest degree possible, learning to “know thyself” (as went the ancient Greek philosophical maxim) was the path towards a fulfilled life. Nietzsche, similarly, believed that this journey of self-discovery was the way to self-actualization. Nietzsche called it “becoming who we are”. Jung called the journey “individuation.” Different names, though largely analogous concepts.
Jung’s path of individuation involved unmasking all of the aspects of oneself that are shrouded in the shadow of the unconscious. For Jung, the mind could be split into the conscience (the cognizant mind that we are aware of in any given moment), and the unconscious. The latter consisting of things that are sub-perceptual and outside the sphere of our awareness, yet affect our beliefs and actions constantly. The ego navigates between the conscious and the unconscious. The path of individuation is to become aware of one’s unconscious, thus integrating it into the conscious. Everyone possesses something Jung called a Shadow, which is a sort of repressed self.
The Shadow is all of the parts of you hidden away from the world, because they are deemed inappropriate, or shameful. The Shadow-self is not an entirely malignant entity, however. One may be repressing positive elements of themselves (such as creativity) simply because they were socialized in an environment that invalidated those facets or traits. Thus, uncovering and “encountering” ones shadow is the necessary but arduous task set forth at our feet. Realizing the positive elements one may have been repressing and then unleashing them is difficult, since one is over-writing years of socialization, but it is often accompanied by a feeling of liberation.
By contrast, acknowledging one’s qualities that they are truly ashamed of is equally necessary but not quite so pleasant. No liberated relief accompanies this part of the process. To admit to oneself the malignance, greed, selfishness, or hatred that they are capable of deep down is a rather painful process. But only through naming one’s weaknesses can one begin to correct or strengthen them. Only by becoming cognizant of the worst possibilities that we are capable of enacting, can we remain vigilant enough to prevent those possibilities from manifesting. Jung tells us: know that you are capable of becoming a killer, and your odds of becoming one go down. Know that you are capable of becoming a tyrant, and your odds of becoming one go down.
We often fool ourselves with the idea that we could never possibly commit acts that seem inhumane to us, never in any universe we can conceive of this. But this is a delusion designed to keep us comfortable, and it ignores psychological truth. Millions of people throughout history have committed acts that they themselves believed to be horrendous, it just took them some time to work their way up to it. Human beings are slaves to the process of habituation. We are made slightly uncomfortable by pushing ourselves just a bit further than we’re used to, then we grow comfortable at our new destination. The human psychology is such that anyone can slowly turn into what they define as a monster. What they abhor today, they can be in two years. As long as they are consistently pushed a little further, but not too far, each day, eventually they’ll go from point A to point Z with the cumulative effect of time.
This has not only been exemplified time and time again in human history (particularly in the last hundred years), but it has been corroborated by a host of high quality behavioral psychological studies. The standard that I hold for “high quality” is double or triple blind, randomized/placebo controlled, peer reviewed, and replicated studies. This is the gold standard of scientific evidence. Behaviorism is the study of how human behavior can be understood through the conditioning of one’s circumstances. ‘Carrots and sticks’ is the crude way of putting it. We are, somewhat unsurprisingly, not too dissimilar from dogs in the way we learn, as the efficacy of Pavlovian conditioning and contingencies demonstrates. With the proper carrots and sticks, we can craft the context of motivations, fears, and incentives that causes people learn to do anything and become anybody. And that’s exactly what groups such as the Nazis did.
So how do you know that you’re capable of evil, without committing it? Well, much like the highly effective 12 Steps Program’s 1rst step, admission is a great starting point. An honest admission that, from an undeniably scientific and evidence-based perspective, you are capable of committing great evil. This is actually a lot of the battle, many people don’t do it. There is a dangerous myth out there that people such as the Nazis were simply “crazy” and therefor “normal, sane” people such as ourselves could never be like them. This line of thinking is highly flawed. For one, it is incredibly ablest, and offensive to mentally ill people. Throwing the mentally ill under the bus and blaming them for all of the world’s problems is neither an ethical nor accurate solution. Secondly, it is statistically impossible that all of the Nazis were “crazy”. There were millions of them. Statistically, the vast majority of them were able-minded individuals, born with cognitive functioning no different than the majority of anyone else’s brains. Many historians worth their salt will even contend that Hitler was not mentally ill, he was just ideologically possessed. So, in light of this scientific evidence, admit to yourself the danger of behaviorally habituating to acts of great horror. You may even want to look back at your own history. Maybe you’ve already done things that you’re not proud of. These past events can act as further evidence for your self-admission, that don’t have to repeat themselves in the future. You may even consider using another 12 Step Program technique, and being brutally honest as your write down all of the people you’ve ever harmed and make a list of all of your flaws. That is known to be highly effective.
Secondly, after the admission of this grave possibility, it is our task to remain constantly vigilant to defend ourselves against it. Constantly being aware of our own behavior and thinking patterns. Questioning ourselves, second-guessing ourselves, asking ourselves if our decisions are being made out of bias to benefit ourselves at the detriment of others (as discussed above). It’s a slippery slope when you start justifying acts that you yourself define as immoral with bias, in order to attain a desire at the expense of others. Intelligent people are especially in danger of developing this habit, so they must be extra cautious, as they can justify nearly anything with their brilliant minds. In order to heighten your level of self-awareness, you might consider taking up mindful meditation. I know, I know. It’s become an eye-rolling suggestion these days in its ubiquity. However, it is an evidence-based practice that improves self-awareness and mood regulation. So you’ll get some extra benefits.
I should also point out that one of the most horrifying and difficult parts of getting to know yourself (other than acknowledging your potential for great malevolence) may be the fact that you are incredibly average. Many of us like to think of ourselves as the heroes of our own stories, and this is understandable. We can only ever experience our lives through our own subjective consciousness, and there are bio-psychological reasons why the mythic structure is ubiquitous across cultures and history. We all long to be the hero in a monomythic tale of our own lives, to have a significant life. But statistically speaking, we are probably average in most ways. There’s an interesting psychological phenomenon known as illusory superiority in which most people believe themselves to be above average across the board, yet the average is so because everybody trends towards it across the board. Perhaps, if I were to offer you any consolation or motivation for this difficult part of the process, it would be this: your only chance at excelling in life is if you first have an accurate appraisal of where you stand, so you know what areas you can capitalize upon and which ones need work. This means you need an honest appraisal of your strengths and weaknesses, and if that means you are average or even below average in most areas, so be it. That is your best chance at success. And know that you’re not alone, everyone is average in most areas, below average in some, and above in a few. That’s the standard. The only thing that matters, to tap into some Greek Stoic wisdom, is how you respond to your circumstances. You didn’t create them.
Jung wants us to face this harsh truth, in order to empower ourselves, in order to remain vigilant and keep ourselves in check. By the same token, he wishes for us to gaze into the darkest depths of our psyche, and rescue from our repressed shadows the gifts which would benefit ourselves and the world. To bring the unconscious out of the darkness and into the light of cognizance.
Jung’s ideas are echoed by Nietzsche, who had a concept he referred to as “the Beast Within.” Likely partially inspired by Charles Darwin’s 1859 publication The Origin of the Species, which sent the academic world’s head spinning, Nietzsche’s concept consists of evolutionary insight into the instincts of our past. What a contemporary evolutionary psychologist might refer to as the mammalian or reptilian brain is what the philosopher was hitting on. He understood that we all have primal drives and urges within us that are vestiges of our ancestry. Drives that evolution has selected for, as they allowed our ancestors to have higher chances of survival, but which perhaps no longer always serve us in our modern context. The drives for sex, and violence are notable among them. These instincts comprise “the beast within” all of us, a reference to our more animalistic and primal hunter-gatherer nomad pre-civilization past and instincts. So, did Nietzsche characterize the beast within as a positive or negative? Much like Jung, he thought it held elements of both.
A good way for understanding this multi-faceted conceptualizing comes from a brief detour into comparing the arguments of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes. Both political theorists and intellectual power houses of their day, they disagreed over one concept coined by Hobbes. Hobbes proposed an idea called “the state of nature”, which referred to the time before modern civilizations when our ancestors were wandering nomadic tribes. Hobbes argued that the state of nature would’ve been inherently negative, characterized by chaos, violence, and living in fear. Rousseau disagreed, and believe the state of nature to have been a time of peace, happiness, and prosperity. Rousseau became famous for fetishizing the Native American tribes, and coining the term “noble savage.” He believed technology and progress were actually destroying the human race, and that a return to a simpler and more natural state of being was called for.
Nietzsche took the middle path between these two perspectives. He understood that some of our primal drives, if acted upon, will cause chaos and suffering within society. By the same token, he asserted that a large part of humanity’s despair comes from cutting ourselves off from and repressing our natural instincts. He referred to this repression as “the will to self-torment”. He proposed that the human animal went from wild animals to a domesticated herd. “Herd Morality” resulted from this, which was Nietzsche’s idea that mass psychology resulted in conformity and the unfortunate lessening of individuality and achievement. Just as Jung believed the Shadow contains elements that ought to be unmasked but never acted upon and positive elements that ought to be liberated, Nietzsche proposed that the Beast Within must be confronted and remain partially caged and partially unleashed. The positive elements of these instincts he referred to as “the divine animal.” He conceptualized of the psyche as divided between competing drives. Those of short term desire in the animalistic brain, and longer term aspiration in the logical brain. One needs to have the discipline to put aside short term desires to achieve goals in life, but total repression will only lead to a catastrophic explosion of that which is repressed.
Thus, Nietzsche’s solution was to follow the examples of the ancient Greek city-states, those he credited with inventing philosophy. The Greeks had festivals which allowed their natural urges to be dispelled. Unbridled sex was not looked down upon, and violent urges could be unleashed in the attendance of gladiatorial games, personal brawls, and duels. Such activities were sanctioned and encouraged by the city-state. This is the same idea that later inspired the now uber successful Purge franchise. So perhaps the franchise is tapping into something that is innately appealing to the human species from an evolutionary biology perspective. This strategic sublimation of primal human urges, as practiced by the ancient Greeks, was also celebrated by thinkers Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade. Yet more intersections of thought, fascinating.
If we are to believe Nietzsche’s proposed solution to the duality of the Beast Within/the Divine Animal problem, we should likely make some updates to the ancient Greek approach. Rather than sanction gladiatorial games and duels, perhaps we might encourage people to take a martial arts class or use a punching bag for example. But even if we don’t want to identically replicate the ancient Greek prescription for the issue, the insight and diagnoses is quite accurate. Humans cannot live in a state of total repression nor total non-repression. A middle path is called for. Perhaps Nietzsche was inspired by his predecessor Kierkegaard, and Kierkegaard’s inspiration of Buddhism. A central tenant of Buddhism is the idea of the Middle Path. Yet another interesting convergence of ideas, in the sense that they came to the same conclusion that extremes are to be avoided. Though they differ in that Buddhist identify desire as the source of suffering, whilst Nietzsche would say that repressing desires is a source of suffering.
Like Jung, Nietzsche also believed that the path to self-actualization, which Jung called individuation and Nietzsche called “becoming who you are” necessitated the confrontation and integration of the Beast Within. One must face and name their primal urges, and determine which ones ought to stay repressed, and how and when they might “purge” or unleash the others. Nietzsche also suggested that some of these urges could be beneficial to the individual and society, and ought to be freed. Indeed, some of the greatest art can come from such instincts. Some of life’s most valuable experiences may come from unleashing “the divine animal” within us. A fulfilling sex life, or a successful career as a boxer could come from strategically embracing select elements of the beast within, perhaps.
Also similarly to Jung, Nietzsche believed in a sort of unconscious, though he referred to it by a different name. To understand this, we must listen to the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, who cast Nietzsche as one of three thinkers in “the School of Suspicion”. For Mr. Ricoeur, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud were all members of this school of thought. The primary element of this school was suspicion was the belief that “obvious truths” are never in fact the truth. Another term helpful for understanding this would be “Hermeneutics of Suspicion”. Hermeneutics is the study of how people interpret the meaning of texts. Hermeneutics of Suspicion, which was practiced by members of the School of Suspicion, means that these thinkers believed that the most obvious possible interpretation of the text was never the correct one. There was always something going on beneath the surface, unseen. The true meaning of things were masked, and had to be unmasked and decoded.
Nietzsche thought that this idea was true when dealing with the conceptualization of the self and the psyche. Who we believe that we are and our identity may appear to be obvious, but the truth is never readily apparent. Some of the psyche is hidden in the labyrinth of the unconscious/Beat Within, and we must delve into this darkness to shine a light on the unknown parts of us to become wholly “who we are.” We must use the Hermeneutics of Suspicion to cast doubt on the idea that the parts of our identity that are readily visible in the conscious mind are in fact the totality of who we are. To some degree, he was addressing the problem of knowledge that we covered earlier: that there are a host of biases and distortions in the human consciousness and thus we must interrogate our own thinking and delve beneath the surface. Recall that we can use the hermeneutics of suspicion (though we didn’t previously have this name for it) to keep a vigilant watch against ourselves habituating into an ideological violent monster. We can also use this to get an accurate appraisal of our weaknesses and strengths. Another part of us lies hidden beneath the surface, and like Jung, Nietzsche believed this hidden self was characterized by both beneficial and malignant constituents.
Nietzsche’s idea of the dual nature of the beast is best represented by his career-long fascination with the Greek god Dionysus. Nietzsche first referenced his interest in Dionysus in his first ever book The Birth of Tragedy, which you can read more about in a coming article about said book;). This fascination remained with him for the rest of his career. Dionysus was characterized by multi-dimensionality and nuance. He was both loved, and feared. He was the god of wine, pleasure, and festivals. But he was also the god of madness, and suffering. He was often called the tragic god, and Nietzsche associated Dionysus heavily with tragedy in his aforementioned first book. In the mythology, the god’s life is surrounded by pain and misfortune. The pleasure and ecstasy he represented came from the same ultimate root as the madness: that of chaos. This chaotic and uncontrollable element of life could confer upon the individual great fortune or great tragedy. (A concept which the Greek Stoic philosophers echoed in their personification of Fortune, the goddess of chance who would make your life and break it the following morning).
This Dionysian chaos stood in opposition to the god of order Apollo, in Nietzsche’s view. Dionysus would intermittently come along and sweep away order; burning systems and power structures to the ground if they’d grown too stagnant and dysfunctional. Thus, Dionysus could be viewed as the god of revolution and change. Again, chaos and change can be a liberating improvement, just as they can be a destructive revolution gone awry like those of the 20th century. Thus the totality of Dionysus, literally everything about him, was a sort of double edged sword. And this is duality of nature that characterizes Dionysus is what captivated and fascinated Nietzsche, for the duality of Dionysus served as a metaphor for the duality of life.
Nietzsche’s great insight here was echoed by Heraclitus thousands of years earlier when he said “everything always has its opposite within itself.” It was also echoed by the German Idealist thinkers, namely Hegel, who believed that there exists in the human consciousness, which mediates our understanding of reality, a dialectic of opposites. The positive and the negative aspects of life are not mutually exclusive entities, but inextricably intertwined. The very existence of one necessitates that of the other, for they are defined against each other. As the Daoist philosophers understood thousands of years prior, without something we understand as bad, there can be no good defined in the opposition to bad. This intricate dialectic of duality was symbolized in the yin-yang.
Centuries later, Nietzsche picked up the mantle of this Daoist/Greek insight. Life necessarily consists of all of the good and all of the bad. In the Twilight of Idols, Nietzsche points out that all life begins in the suffering and pain of child birth. The mother is physically tortured, and the child is in a state of terror that is so extreme it must be repressed. But this new life can experience lots of beauty and pleasure. The pain and terror that marks the commencement of the gift/curse of life was, for Nietzsche, a symbol of life’s ultimate duality.
Given this was an inescapable fact of life and being, Nietzsche proposed that the best response to this truth was for all of us to adopt a “Dionysian Tragic World View.” That is, to understand and acknowledge this dual nature of life, that the tragic and the beautiful are entwined. After seeing this truth, there were two paths the individual could take. On the one hand, they could fall into the trap of passive nihilism and feel bitter towards life for pairing so much pain with pleasure. They could determine that existence is cruel for such a design. Or they could take the stance that the universe is inherently design-less and meaningless, but we humans poses meaning-making brains and this discrepancy causes our contexts to be universally cruel. To avoid tumbling into such a nihilistic trap, the philosopher asserted that one must possess a strength of character he called “the great health.”
Someone who possessed this strength of character could adopt what Nietzsche championed, which was a “Dionysian Affirmation of Life.” That is, to accept the dualistic totality of things, to gracefully accept the tragic and the beautiful as one. Not only to accept, but to love it and revel in it, which Nietzsche called Amor Fati (quite literally translating to “love of fate”). Thus, birth, life, suffering, ecstasy, joy, and death all come together as a tragically beautiful cycle of existence. This is the person who understands that without misfortune and pain, there could be no fortune and pleasure. That every event of conflict is an opportunity to grow stronger. Nietzsche’s potentially most famous quote still remains, “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” No, sorry, that wasn’t Kanye West who originally said that.
This is particularly pertinent today. The cultural zeitgeist of the day has the mass psychological propensity leaning away from nuance and duality, and towards singularly-dimensional thinking. Most people characterize everything (let alone everybody else) as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. This not only takes us away from the truth, but it makes us less empathetic towards our fellow humans. “Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance” said Albert Maysles. To return to what was briefly referenced earlier, the 20th century failed revolutions, such things could only be possible with two conditions: 1. The habituation process described above, that can slowly lead people to commit horrendous acts from a behaviorist perspective. 2. The removal of nuance in the way one perceives the external world and other people. Everyone and everything, under the possession of such ideological illusions, can have no nuance or duality within their natures: They can have no humanity, essentially, and thus one can justify their mass execution because they see their enemy as “evil” or “sub-human”. The group identity discussed in the previous article plays into this as well. Give it a read, below, if you’re so inclined. Now, this is just a guess, and of course I could be wrong. But I think we may be in desperate need of adopting a mass Dionysian Tragic World View. Not just in the limited sense that life is both tragic and beautiful, but that other humans have both positive and negative qualities. That nuance and duality are the true ‘state of nature’.
We began this intellectual journey by discussing the convergence of Nietzsche and Jung. But naming only two thinkers was really a matter of logistic convenience, lest the title grow too long or the opening paragraph throw too much information at the reader. Really, we studied the convergence of ideas by Nietzsche, Jung, Wheeler, Darwin, the Stoics, Kierkegaard, Buddhism, Daoism, Freud, Marx, and others. Perhaps the fact that so many great thinkers overlapped in this area denotes some kind of truth that we ought to pay attention to, perhaps not and they were all coincidentally mistaken. Or they could’ve been in the vicinity of truth, thought slightly off the mark. The possibilities are endless. But either way, we can all try the actions recommended by these insights and ideas and see if they enrich our own lives, see if they work for us.
To be clear, neither Nietzsche nor Jung is suggesting that you can nor should correct literally all of your weaknesses. They are suggesting that you take stock of your shadow/beast within, rescue the good and keep the bad locked in. Essentially, capitalize upon your strengths keep your weaknesses in check: work on them if you can, or accept them if you can’t. For Jung, humanity wouldn’t be what it is without flaws. “There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the “thorn in the flesh” is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent.” Jung and Nietzsche would certainly agree that defects and flaws are opportunities for personal growth.
Some of these questions are perennially pertinent, and have no clear objective answers. You may be able to come up with subjective answers that work for you and your own life. Some of these questions do have evidence-based solutions that we would be wise to adopt, as they currently stand as the best tools we have at the ready. But, as per usual, I’m just a curator and I don’t have all of the answers. I just ask questions. It is up to you to come up with your own conclusions and forge your own path through the strange thing called life.
Perhaps we should all learn to better know ourselves, by casting doubt on the idea that we already do. Perhaps we should try to be brutally honest about the parts of ourselves we generally prefer to ignore, to avoid becoming whatever we define as immoral. Perhaps by doing so we can name the foes within ourselves, and free the repressed heroes on our paths to self-actualization. Perhaps the old adage of “everything in moderation” will serve us well. Perhaps by remaining vigilant and interrogating our own thoughts and behaviors, we can live more intelligently, honestly, and even successfully. Perhaps we would be well served by adopting a Dionysian world view, and understanding the duality inherent within all things, to make us better human beings. And perhaps we would be freed of some of the psychological burdens of life’s painful elements, by remembering the meaning behind the pain. That everything, the great and the terrible parts of life, are one and the same. And that we are but powerless passengers on a ship being blown about by the winds of Fortune. Maybe we will be happier suffering powerless creatures if we love everything that happens on these rough chaotic waters. We say ‘yes’ to the totality of life.
‘till next time my friends,
Brian
